Shakespeare Definitely Got His Heart Broken A Lot
by friendfinn
Summary: When I first chose to take this class, English Lit & Comp, all my friends told me I had made a good decision. "Mr. Kirkland is a really great teacher; after that course, you'll learn to love reading the classics!" Well, this is the end of the school year, and -surprise- I still haven't learned to love reading musty old books and Shakespeare's fussy old iambic pentameter.


**Warnings for self-harm, suicidal ideation, mentions of sexual harassment + assault, other sensitive topics  
** **Shakespeare plays discussed: Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, possibly a couple of others**

 **Prompt: "Two characters in high school" and the song "The Kids Aren't Alright" by Fall Out Boy**

 **X**

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 **Essay prompt: Shakespeare is hailed as one of the greatest playwrights of all time in part for his ability to craft stories with timeless morals and meaning. Examine the range of Shakespeare plays we have read this year. In what ways are these stories relevant to life today? In what ways are they outdated?**

 **Write a well-developed essay reflecting on the universal themes of any one or more of these plays.**

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Alfred Jones

Kirkland

English Lit & Comp

29 May 2015

 **Universal Themes of Life in Shakespeare's Works**

 **Essay**

When I first chose to take this class, English Literature and Composition, all my friends told me I had made a really good decision. "Mr. Kirkland is a really great teacher!" they said. "After that course, you'll learn to love reading the classics!" Well, this is pretty much the end of the school year, and -surprise- I still haven't learned to love reading musty old books and Shakespeare's fussy old iambic pentameter. That's why I think you failed as a teacher- not in teaching me, but in teaching my friends who learned, from this class, to "love reading classic novels". Because I don't think the point of literature is for it to be enjoyed. Or, rather, I think that the enjoyment is supposed to come from the fulfillment of its real purpose- to deliver a message. Once during class discussion you said something that really made me think: you said, "The world is built on stories." If you think about it, the only reason any of our society even works is because of stories, lies, make-believe; you know, like businesses, societies, even money. They're all real, but only because a lot of people believe in them. The reason classic literature is so valuable, the reason people go round sticking labels that say _classic_ on it, is because those particular stories did a really good job expressing one of the "universal themes" of human existence. People want to see themselves reflected back at them from the world. And Shakespeare? Even though he's an old white guy who wrote a bunch of sex jokes and gratuitous violence for a living, people hero-worship him cause they recognize themselves, and their own world, in his writing, and they feel acknowledged. They feel understood.

That's what I learned from Shakespeare, and your class. I don't care if you'd rather I learn to _love_ reading books transcribed from the Greek that was Greek before English even existed. I'd rather feel understood than feel love. And I'm really glad I took this class, because I don't know if you remember being a teen anymore (It was probably a long time ago for you… just kidding!) but you feel like the world doesn't understand you, and you can't even explain yourself because you don't understand yourself. That's cause your brain and all your hormones are changing so fast that sometimes you really _don't_ know your own self; so much of all that development happens without you even knowing it, and then you discover that you've changed into this whole different person overnight, with all these feelings you don't remember ever having felt. It's like good old Mother Nature's way of giving you a test-drive of adulthood, except the first time you try driving it, it's simultaneously snowing and sleeting out and there's black ice all over the road and then your brakes go bust and there are also ten hundred innocent puppies in the back seat with no seatbelts and you have to keep every single one of them from breaking their little skulls. And I think I've gotten off-track, so let me reiterate the main point: when you're a teenager, you feel misunderstood by everyone, and the most important thing in the world is the thing that you see yourself in, the thing that makes you _feel_ like yourself again. And I saw myself in Shakespeare's plays. I felt like I really understood Hamlet, and Ariel, and Cordelia, and even the villains like Shylock and Caliban. The end of _King Lear_ made me cry. That was why I hated it so much.

Cause Shakespeare obviously knew a lot about people; in some ways, his plays are really outdated and nonsensical. I mean, obviously nobody actually talks in perfect iambs, and nobody wears tights like in that one video you showed in class once that made everybody laugh even though it was supposed to be a super tragic scene. And I still don't know what a ducat is, or anything about what the heck Antonio was even doing with all those ships that he had money on, or anything at all about sixteenth-century Italy except that their legal system was really messed up. And I know you're always complaining about how "kids these days are on their phones all the time but they can't even be bothered to Google something for half a second" or whatever, but the truth is that I never bothered to look up any of that because it wasn't the important part. Also because it's all probably really boring, but mainly because all those exact facts aren't the point of reading Shakespeare. If old Will had ever cared about any of that, he'd have become like a textbook editor or something instead of a playwright, and probably never have been remembered ten years past his death. But Shakespeare didn't do that. He was a storyteller. And when he wrote The Merchant of Venice, he wrote it as a story about friendship, and romance, and the pitfalls of greed. He wrote it for Shylock and his story and his speech, _"If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?_ " He wrote it for Antonio, because he wanted to write about giving somebody else everything, and how you can be left with nothing in the end, and how much it hurts even if you don't regret it at all. And after you told us Shakespeare was bisexual, I thought maybe he'd had a Bassanio, too, and maybe his Bassanio married a beautiful, badass, heroic Portia and left him all alone, and it makes sense because how else would he have known how to write those characters, those feelings, in such an accurate way? Yeah. Shakespeare definitely got his heart broken a ton. It shows.

And we all know an Antonio somewhere, after all. I know this guy- his name is Antonio, too, go figure?- and he's in love with this other guy named Lovino. I mean, _super in love._ Everybody knows that he's been crushing on Lovino since the fifth grade. And Lovino's never liked him back. But the thing is that Lovino knows Antonio would do anything for him, so he always bosses him around and says really mean things to him, and makes Toni give him stuff. Except he isn't really making Toni do anything, because Toni does it of his own free will, just like Antonio in the play. And then Lovino started crushing on this girl, and he made Toni help him get together with her. And I think that must have sucked, helping your crush get together with another person because you liked them so much that you'd do anything to make them happy. I can sort of understand doing favors for a person because you want them to like you back, but with something like that… Toni must have known, right from the beginning, that even if he helped Lovino with this, even if he was super nice and amazing and cool, Lovino would never like him back in the way he wanted him to. It was like Portia's lead casket, where it said "Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath." And Antonio in the book must have known that, too. Because I didn't really understand about book-Antonio's real character, and what Shakespeare was trying to say about him, until you took us to see that production of _Merchant of Venice._ And I want you to know that I honestly thought you were talking absolute crap about how "Shakespeare isn't really Shakespeare unless you see it onstage", but you were so _totally_ right and when I get stupendously rich and famous, I'll donate a ton of money to our school so that you can stop worrying about budget cuts and duct-taping up old books and you can take all your classes to see every Shakespeare production that comes in town. Yeah.

 _The Merchant of Venice_ has a happy ending, right? Because Bassanio and Portia get married, and he's not nearly as awesome as she is but she loves him anyway, and that other guy and Portia's maid also get married, and Shylock doesn't get to cut out a pound of Antonio's flesh after all because Portia is an effing genius. I mean, it's a comedy. So that's what I thought, when I read the thing on paper. But in the ending of the production, the stage goes all dark and the two happy couples go offstage and there's only Antonio left. And you kinda see that even though he's got so much to be grateful for, that he's not dead and that all his ships are back, he's also really lonely all of a sudden. All this stuff's happened, and he was way too busy worrying about his debt and Shylock's cutting out a pound of his flesh (who even thinks of that kind of thing, though, huh Shakespeare?) to have room in his mind to think about his best friend getting married. But now it's all over, and suddenly he realizes that his whole life has changed and he didn't even have time to process it. And the guy he almost died _for_ is married to another person, and probably going to have sex with her that very night. And it's not like Bassanio did anything wrong, but Antonio is a little sad anyway, and it's a sadness that can't be escaped.

And it's understandable. Cause when Shakespeare writes sad stuff, he adds a little bit of hope in it and that makes everything ten times more real, but when he writes happy stuff he adds a little bit of sadness, because otherwise the happiness would sort of be meaningless. Like when Elizabeta said during book discussion that maybe even when we're sad, we're actually desperately happy and we just don't realize it because most of us haven't ever felt true sadness. And Francis said, "So you think you've felt 'true' sadness, then?" and Elizabeta said, "Were you even listening to what I was saying?" because what she meant was that none of us can even understand each others' emotions because we've never felt them. I can guess pretty well at what Antonio was feeling at the end of _Merchant,_ though, and I don't think it was happiness. And I don't think Toni is happy either. I wonder if he did it because he thought that seeing Lovino happy would make him happy, since he says Lovino is his best friend, but I think it's more likely that Toni is just a really, really unhealthily selfless guy and Lovino should try harder not to lose him. So should Bassanio. Cause when Antonio went round saying stuff like, "In sooth I know not why I am so sad," did Bassanio even notice or care or anything? Or was he too busy worrying about the hot chick that was now accepting suitors? Bassanio said that he loved Antonio more than anything, but did he really? You're sort of left with that doubt, even though it's a happy ending.

It's like that logical argument thing that you taught us at the beginning of the year when we were all writing our argumentative essays. How people assume that if one thing is true, a thing linked to that is also true, so we should begin by stating something that's undisputedly true and then people will be more likely to believe our bullcrap opinions because subconsciously, they categorize you as either "pure truth-telling" or "pure liar". Sometimes I feel like that spark of hope Shakespeare put in even his tragedies like _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet,_ just doesn't exist for a person like me who isn't star-crossed or royal or a warrior or anything like that. And if it was just me, I'd never imagine that such a thing would exist. But when I read Shakespeare's tragedies, it felt like that little bit of hope was real, and that if it could happen to a place like Macbeth's Scotland, or Hamlet's Denmark, it could probably happen to a crappy little room in a crappy little apartment in the Midwest. It's like that thing where you don't want to believe a teacher who only ever says good things about your work, you only start believing them once you start getting comments like "Get rid of all these sentence fragments" or "Cut this paragraph" or "I know you can do better than this", because then you know that this person isn't afraid to tell it to you straight if you need to hear it straight, and you know that they really mean it when they say, "Good work". Shakespeare never sugarcoated the world, in all its full glorious crappiness. He wrote incredibly sad things, brutal deaths and bloody murder, soul-crushing guilt and misery. Everybody knows that that stuff is real. And that makes you trust that when he does write something happy and hopeful, he really _does_ see that as a part of the world. And you start believing that you can have it, too.

Don't get me wrong. I still hate Shakespeare's style of writing, I still think it's an absolute pain in the neck to have to look up all those obscure ancient words, and I still think he REALLY needed a lesson from someone, preferably as mean as you, on how to shorten and simplify your God damn plot. But just cause I don't like him doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the really valuable stuff I learned from reading him. Sometimes you just feel really alone, you know? Actually, I _know_ you know- you talked about that in class, once, too. I know you probably didn't think anyone was listening when you said it, but I was. (You'll probably yell at me for using "know" that many times in just two sentences, but at this point I don't even care. I'm not even going to turn this essay in. I'll just write a shorter 5-paragraph one so I can get a good grade. I don't even know why I'm still writing all these things that I know don't even have anything to do with the assignment. I just need to get it out, I guess? I don't know. Whoops, more "know"s.)

(You'd also yell at me for putting that much crap in parentheses.)

You said, "Literature is different for every person. For me, it was small the way a life buoy is small in an ocean. Literature is nothing compared to the endlessness of human suffering, but if you find it in the right place, it can become so much more." Except you probably said it way more poetically and better than I could paraphrase it, but whatever. The point is, it was 2:50 PM on a Friday and everybody else was just begging for the lesson to be over and fidgeting and packing up their books and crap, but I was listening to you and when you said that, it made me think that you'd felt some of the despair you talked about when we discussed _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet._ And it made me think that you also understood that all these kids you're paid to lecture and yell at and and bear the hate of on test day- all these kids, they've all felt it too, in some form. I mean, some teachers are really uncaring, like they don't even care if you're having a really bad day, you'll slog through the quadratic equation if you know what's good for you. And some teachers pretend to be friendly, like they'll ask you how your day's going, but they never actually stop to have a real conversation. I never once saw you ask anyone from our class how their day was going, but when you talked book stuff with us, you really meant what you said. I've got nothing against teachers who just impart their knowledge and nothing more, but I really appreciated how hard you tried to teach us. It's just that what you tried to teach to all these messed up kids, at this really messed up high school, isn't something you can just say in words, or with some crappy Powerpoint in Comic Sans on the overhead.

And I really wish you'd said that thing, about the life buoy and the ocean, some other time. Not when nobody was listening, but when everybody was listening. At the very beginning of class, or during group discussion when kids would get shamed for talking or not paying attention while someone was talking. I think a lot of people needed to hear it. Like Ludwig Beilschmidt and Feliciano Vargas, who only got to date for two weeks last year before Feli's homophobic dad found out and came screaming into the school in the middle of third hour and dragged Feli out of school and Lovino Vargas had to be taken down to the office ten minute after it happened because he had a panic attack. And Ludwig didn't show up in class for a week, and then for his final project in sociology he talked about homophobia in our society, and he actually started crying during his presentation and everybody looked horrified but nobody dared stand up and go up to him and so he just kept crying with his face in his hands for a minute straight until Mr. Wang just sighed and told him to sit back down. And I bet if Ludwig had known that _Annie On My Mind_ was a book that existed, and _Brokeback Mountain,_ and that William Shakespeare'd written one hundred twenty-six love poems for a man, he would have felt a little less lonely at least.

And Elizabeta Héderváry, who ran for class president and won, but resigned in three weeks because the second she started that push for a revision of the school dress code, like twenty different guys decided that meant it was okay to harass her in the hallways and catcall her and text her dick pics. And when she and a group of girls started that campaign to end the objectification of teen girls and came to school in crop tops, and in the gap period after second hour some guy shoved Lili Vogel against the sophomore lockers and tried to grab her bra, and then Vash Zwingli punched him so hard his nose broke and blood spurted everywhere and the vice principal had to drag everyone to the office by the wrist and all those girls went around defiantly wearing crappy T-shirts from the lost and found for the rest of the day. And how, after that day, Gilbert Beilschmidt broke up with her in public because he was convinced that she was a "lesbian since you love women so much". I hope Elizabeta's eyes lit up when she read the scene in _Merchant_ where Portia saves Antonio's ass with her epic unfair-lawyer-conning skills. If she'd read a book like _The Feminine Mystique,_ or a novel like _A Doll's House,_ maybe it would have kept her chin up after all that, knowing that there were other people trying to make a change in the world.

Or Ivan Braginsky, who everybody hates now, because his little sister Natalya has him wrapped around her little finger. If he'd read _The Tragedy of Macbeth,_ instead of dropping out of Honors English and starting to smoke, maybe he'd have been better prepared for a subtle betrayal by a member of his family. Or Toris and Feliks, who have both been in the closet about being transgender for two years. Or Michelle, who was sexually harassed. I'm a senior in high school, and I know people who've struggled with eating disorders, aggressive and subtle racism, subtle and aggressive sexism, homophobia, mental illness, domestic abuse, getting addicted to drugs and alcohol and smoking, getting arrested- who've been really, really low and who could really have used a life buoy. Sure, maybe there aren't any classic novels about being curled up on the floor of a dingy apartment at one in the morning, suffering from nicotine withdrawal, and nobody to call or text because everybody at school thinks you're fundamentally disgusting. But that's what symbolism is for- when Hamlet says, "Life's but a poor player, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage," the beauty's that it could apply to any situation. When he says, "To be, or not to be, that is the question," there are people out there who let out a breath they didn't even know they were holding because someone finally stopped tiptoeing around and _said_ it, acknowledged the choice, and even if he's a fictional and possibly delusional Danish prince who goes on to kill most of the cast, it's a relief to finally read something that lets you think about suicide. Those are the people who feel like Ophelia, or Juliet, who pity Fortinbras and not Laertes.

That's me.

I have to keep reminding myself that I'm never going to show this essay to anybody else, because it's scary just admitting it to myself, let alone another person. That I think about suicide. Not just sometimes, but often. I have a plan, too. Are we still doing the literary allusions thing? I guess I'm like Bee in _Little Bee._ When I enter a room, sometimes I can't even relax until I've figured out how I'd kill myself if I had to in just a few seconds. That's just when I'm at my worst, though. I never went through all the stuff that Bee did. I don't even know when the thought of suicide first came into my mind, because I never grew up seeing that kind of stuff on TV, or reading anything like that. All I know is that sometimes the world seems so overwhelming that it'd be better to just… not deal with it. For me, it's not dramatic, or beautiful, or tragic, like Shakespeare writes it. It's just inescapably _there._ I mean, I've always had a pretty good life. My parents both love me. I've got friends and everything, so why do I feel so lonely? This is where maybe you and I would disagree, Mr. Kirkland, because books _do_ help people feel less lonely, but only to a certain extent. After that point, you start really needing other actual tangible people to talk to and to hear what you're saying. I guess that's why I'm still sorta pretending to myself that I'm going to turn this essay in. Because it's so freeing, to be setting down these words on paper (well, on my computer screen) with the intention of having another person read them. And I don't have to be scared that you'll do anything, because you're never actually going to read it. So.

I could tell you everything. I could make it into a good story. I could say, "It started with the cutting and progressed from there". I could tell you about how I learned to block my Google search history from our Internet providers because I was so scared that people would see that I was searching stuff like "how to draw blood without a razor" and "do i have depression free quiz online". And I'd wonder if it was normal to feel sad all the time, if losing interest in doing fun things and hanging out with friends was just the "teenage change" that we'd all been warned was coming. I'd wonder if it was normal that cutting my legs and hips was so much more soothing than talking to my mom over a cup of hot chocolate and cookies. And I could learn, from biology textbooks and the Internet, about the chemical causes of major depressive disorder, and how you lack endorphins, and how the adrenaline and painkiller release of getting injured temporarily makes you feel good and battle-ready. By junior year, I could list the main symptoms of depression off the top of my head. But all that never clicked with me- I could know it, but I couldn't accept that a mere chemical imbalance was what made the world a terrible place for me. I didn't find something I could really relate to until I took your class and I was forced to give classic literature more than a second glance in order to save my GPA. Once you've read _Hamlet_ three times over looking for that one obscure reference to include in your essay, you start to get a feel for what the damn play's _really_ about, you know? And what it's about is one guy, who loses all his dreams and then finds a new cause in getting revenge on the person who took them away. _Hamlet_ was about not trusting anyone, not even yourself, and how scary and horrible that is.

Sometimes I just feel really tired, and I want everything to stop for a while so I can catch my breath. I feel like all the mistakes I've made, nothing's ever going to be able to fix it, like when Macbeth says, "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine/Making the green one red." I know about feeling like that, like you have so much guilt inside you that it would change the color of the ocean. I can know how that feels, even if I've never killed a king. If I was free from all my obligations, I guess I'd be like Ophelia. I'd run off singing inappropriate songs and probably kill myself in some place far less poetic than a running mountain stream. Cause Ophelia got told by her boyfriend that "Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love," and then he left her, so how could she _not_ doubt that the world was the way it was? Hamlet wanted Ophelia to believe in his love the way she believed in the stars, but no person's love can be stronger than the stars. And the Earth goes around the sun, not the other way around.

Universal themes. Shakespeare understood them. You'd think that reading really sad things would just make me more sad, but that's not the way it is. Like when we read the Odyssey (which I hated, by the way) and you taught us about the concept of catharsis, and how all those hardworking Greek people would come to see tragedies acted out, and seeing all that sadness onstage would make them feel better about themselves- cleansed, in a way, that was the word you used. And that would make them go home and have sex and give birth to the next generation. The point is that sometimes really horribly sad things can give you hope, even if they don't have a happy ending. Even the tragedies we read in class never had a completely meaningless ending. Hamlet said that life, in the end, "signif[ied] nothing," but the ending of _Hamlet_ wasn't meaningless at all. It didn't end in sound and fury, or violence, but with a good man taking up the throne and pledging to do better than his predecessors. It showed that life goes on, even after incredible, unspeakable things happen. The same thing happened in _Macbeth,_ and _King Lear,_ and _Romeo and Juliet._ The people we were all rooting for, they died, but their lives didn't turn out to be meaningless after all. There was always somebody left living to step up to the plate and take up the mantle of responsibility, to speak metaphorically, since you seem to like that kind of thing. And if my soul were a city, I thought, maybe my life is like a Shakespeare tragedy, and most of my cast is dead already, so I'm close to the end. But maybe, at the end, that little bit of hope will finally appear and take control, and I'll end that way instead of the way I feel right now. Maybe it's time for all of us to pick our heroes. (God, that was incredibly cheesy, but I don't know how else to put it.) So I thought that if I wanted to end that way, with hope instead of with fear, I'd have to stick it out till the end and just wait and see how I turned up. But I still don't know. I'm holding on for now, waiting for some kind of sign that continuing to live is the right thing to do, but it's hard. I hope the change comes soon.

Cause the world is full of Regans and Gonerils and Hamlets, who say a lot of trash about love that they don't really mean. It's sort of hard to choose to be a Cordelia, and pick the King of France over your own father. Even if you think you could be happy living in France, you hesitate to leave England and everything you know. All Cordelia did was tell the truth, and she got kicked out of her old life for it. But she did it anyway, and when she could have stayed safe she chose to defend the guy that kicked her out instead. Sometimes the only way to fix things is to throw your all into the game without fear. Maybe you have to get rid of all the figurative Edmunds and Hamlets and Macbeths before your Fortinbras can show himself and start repairing your war-torn country. Maybe those parts of you, the unhealthy parts, have to die before the truth can be unveiled. I guess it'll probably hurt to kill those parts of yourself, almost like killing a person you know is bad and who's done bad things, but who you love anyway. You'll never really know if killing them was the right thing to do, only that it was the thing you needed at that time.

I don't know if any of that even made sense, but yeah; to summarize, I guess I'm saying that I found a part of myself in the most stereotypical lit nerd plays ever, which is really kinda embarrassing to actually admit. And I'm still not okay, and reading some old classic novel's never going to fix me, but either way, I think I understood what you were trying to teach with this unit, about the universal themes and all. And I think I can respect Shakespeare for touching so many people, for understanding certain parts of humanity so well. He understood that, rather than circumstances converging on one person and defeating him, the real danger comes from _inside_ that person, the fatal flaw. There's a key difference, in Shakespeare's plays, between the character who can't control the pain he causes himself and the character who feels pain, but overcomes it.

I really want to be the latter, you know. I want to get better, get over this. I haven't given up yet. Seeing the way the people in our school have kept fighting for happiness despite all the things they go through, despite how _not okay_ they are- it's made me realize that it's all right to sometimes go through life not being okay. I think you're a person that can understand me when I say that I can see the "resilience of the human spirit" in them, just as strongly as I can see it in Shakespeare's stories. We come from all around the world, and some of us are really going to change this country, this planet. I can believe that. And I'm really scared of saying this, too, but maybe I will turn this essay in after all. With the crappy metaphors, overdramatic symbolism, rambling, personal confessions and all. I don't know what will happen if I do, when someone finally knows all the things I've been thinking over the course of this school year but not saying. But I don't want to graduate with all this still lumped inside of me. I owe it to my class. I want so badly to see them not give up, to persevere onward, and if even one person ever noticed that I was having a hard time and wanted to see me keep going anyway, I'd like to do that for that one person. And a strong person admits it when something's not alright.

If nobody ever noticed, maybe you'll even be the first one, Mr. K. None of us are alright. I think you already know that. Maybe you don't think there's anything you can do to help. Maybe that's true- maybe fear and pain and fighting are all just part of the human condition, and will always exist. Probably everybody has to experience hurt in their lives, nothing you can do about it. But, without Shakespeare and his dumb universal themes of suffering and desperation and hope, I wouldn't understand as much about the world as I do, and… to be honest, who even knows how much difference that's going to make in my life from here on out?

So that's why I thought maybe I'll turn this in. Because that'd be a step towards not committing suicide, and a link to something in this world that can keep me anchored- somebody knowing- and a step, too, towards becoming disgustingly wealthy and being able to donate those brand-new books and Shakespeare tickets to your future classes like I said! And maybe, in that way, I'll make a little difference in those kids' lives, like you made in ours.

God, are you still even reading this? If you reached this part, congratulations for slogging through some truly melodramatic, badly written crap, and, well… thanks for sticking with me this far. I guess if you're seeing these words, I did decide to turn this in to you after all, and you know everything. I can't even imagine what you must think of me right now. I'm probably really nervous about you having read this, and I might even be panicking right now about somebody else knowing about everything, because I'm not a brave person, so… don't leave me hanging, Mr. K! What you choose to do with this essay is in your hands now. Um, don't fuck it up, I guess?

* * *

 **all of Shakespeare's plays were written by Shakespeare  
**

 ** _Annie on My Mind_** **is a book by Nancy Garden about two girls in NYC who fall in love.  
 _Brokeback Mountain_ is a short story by Annie Proulx about two ranchers 1960s-1980s who fall in love.  
 _The Feminine Mystique_ is a highly influential 1963 nonfiction feminist work by Betty Friedan.  
 _A Doll's House_ is a play about a housewife by Henrik Ibsen.  
 _Little Bee_ is a book by Chris Cleave about a Nigerian asylum-seeker to the UK. **

**the Odyssey is by Homer**

 **(i really hope i'm not breaking any rules by mentioning these books haha)**

 **i've always wanted to write a story with england as america's teacher in high school, but i didn't think this would be the piece haha  
The Misty Jewel gave me the prompt for this story! i honestly don't know what this turned into, it was more of a gratuitous self-exploration piece than anything. i probably ended up making it too personal to myself, but whatever argjhd i have to study for my final exams so i don't have time to edit this extensively  
Alfred's experiences with self-harm and suicide are drawn from my own experiences and having talked to other people who struggle with the same things. however, my school is much more privileged than the school Alfred describes.**

 **1 (800) 273-8255  
** **National Suicide Prevention Lifeline**

 **www . suicidepreventionlifeline . org**

 **thanks for reading.**


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